The Little Fairy: A Triad Runner’s Unlikely Friendship on Portland Street#
Cindy wasn’t her real name. Her real name was Lau Mei-ling, but nobody on Portland Street called her that. The mama-san at the brothel had given her “Cindy” because a British sailor once told her all pretty Chinese girls should have English names, and the mama-san, who’d survived the fall of Shanghai and two bad marriages and a bout of tuberculosis that should’ve killed her, wasn’t in the business of arguing with men who paid.
The girls at the brothel called her Siu Sin—Little Fairy. Not because she was delicate or ethereal. Because she floated. She moved through rooms without seeming to touch the floor, showed up at your elbow without making a sound, vanished from conversations mid-sentence like she’d been edited out. You’d be talking to her and then she just wasn’t there, and you couldn’t remember the exact moment she left.
Namchoi met her on a Wednesday in June 1941. He was delivering a package to the brothel on Portland Street—a paper bag with a jade bracelet that one of Ah Fuk’s men had confiscated from a debtor and was now sending to the mama-san as partial payment for a tab running since February. The transaction was nothing special. The brothel was nothing special. Portland Street was packed with brothels the way Nathan Road was packed with shops—they were the local industry, as normal as selling vegetables.
What was remarkable was what happened when Namchoi walked through the beaded curtain into the front room and saw Cindy sitting on a rattan chair, painting her toenails red, and she looked up at him and said, in perfect Hakka dialect: “You’re from Taishan.”
It wasn’t a question.
~
Nobody spoke Hakka on Portland Street. Nobody spoke Hakka anywhere in Kowloon, as far as Namchoi knew. The Hakka were scattered across the New Territories in villages that urban Chinese treated the way cities always treat their rural fringe—with a mix of condescension and forgetting. Hearing Hakka in a Kowloon brothel was like hearing birdsong in a factory. It didn’t belong, and because it didn’t belong, it meant something.
“How’d you know?” Namchoi asked, in Cantonese, because Cantonese was the city’s language and speaking anything else in public was admitting you were an outsider.
“Your shoes,” Cindy said. She pointed with the nail polish brush. “Hakka women make shoes with a double stitch on the heel. My mother made shoes like that.”
Namchoi looked down at his shoes. They were falling apart. The double stitch on the heel was the only thing holding the left one together.
“Sit down,” Cindy said. “I’ll make tea.”
He sat down. She made tea. And for the first time since he’d arrived in Hong Kong—for the first time since he’d left Duanfen, really, for the first time since Ah Juan’s back room—he felt something loosen in his chest. Not safety. Nothing that grand. More like the feeling of setting down a heavy thing you’d been carrying so long you’d forgotten it was there.
~
Cindy was twenty-two. She’d been working at the brothel since sixteen, which was young but not unusually young—the sex trade in colonial Hong Kong ran on the same principle as every other industry: labor was cheap, demand was steady, and nobody with the power to change things had any reason to bother.
She was from a Hakka village in the New Territories, near Sha Tin. Her father had sold her to the mama-san for fifty dollars and a bag of rice. He’d told the family she’d gone to work at a factory in Kowloon. Maybe he believed it. People believe what they need to believe, especially when the alternative is knowing you’ve sold your daughter to a whorehouse.
Cindy told Namchoi this story the second time they met, four days after the first. She told it flat, the way you’d give directions from one street to another—turn left here, cross the road there, watch for traffic. Facts. Geography. Her life as a series of turns she hadn’t chosen.
“Do you hate him?” Namchoi asked. Meaning her father.
Cindy looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. Then she laughed—a short, hard laugh, like a stone hitting a wall. “Hate takes energy,” she said. “I use my energy for other things.”
~
They became friends. This needs explaining, because friendship between a low-level triad runner and a prostitute in 1941 Kowloon wasn’t the kind of relationship either party would’ve described with that word. There was no vocabulary for it. Men went to brothels for sex. Women worked in brothels for money. The transaction was clear, and anything outside the transaction was suspect.
But Namchoi didn’t want sex from Cindy. And Cindy, who’d spent six years developing an exquisitely calibrated sense for what men wanted, recognized this right away. She recognized it the way a locksmith recognizes a lock—by the shape of the absence, by what wasn’t there.
What wasn’t there was desire. Not desire for her specifically—she was used to that and could’ve handled it. What wasn’t there was desire for women in general. She saw it in the way his eyes moved—or didn’t move—when the other girls walked past. The other girls in their silk cheongsams, with their perfume and their practiced smiles. Most men’s eyes tracked them like compass needles swinging north. Namchoi’s eyes stayed put.
She didn’t say anything about it. Not the first time, not the second, not ever. Didn’t need to. They both knew. And the knowing, unspoken, became the foundation of their friendship—a mutual recognition of mutual concealment, the way two people wearing masks at a party might nod at each other, acknowledging not their faces but their masks.
~
The brothel on Portland Street wasn’t a grim place. This needs saying, because the temptation—the literary temptation, the moral temptation—is to paint it as dark and sad and full of suffering women. Some of that was true. But it was also loud and bright and full of laughter and gossip and the particular energy that builds up wherever people are forced to perform happiness for a living. The girls sang. They played cards between clients. They argued about hairstyles and movie stars and whether the Japanese would invade and what they’d do if the Japanese invaded.
Ah Ping, the oldest at twenty-eight, said she’d hide in the ceiling.
Mei-mei, the youngest at fifteen, said she’d pretend to be Japanese.
Cindy said nothing. Cindy never talked about the future. The future was a luxury, like privacy, like choosing your own name.
~
Namchoi started showing up at the brothel regularly—not as a client, but as a presence. He brought things. Small things. A packet of White Rabbit candies. A newspaper. Once, a pair of scissors Cindy had mentioned needing to trim her own hair because the mama-san charged the girls for haircuts.
In return, Cindy gave him something he hadn’t known he needed: a space where he could exist without performing. In the triad world, every interaction was a calibration—who had power, who wanted power, who was watching, who’d report. On Portland Street, in the back room where Cindy kept a small altar to Guanyin and a stack of movie magazines, Namchoi could sit in a chair and be quiet without the quiet meaning anything.
He told her things. Not everything—not about Ah Juan, not about the failed marriage, not about the dead boy in the barracks. But smaller things. That he missed the sound of rain on a tin roof. That he couldn’t sleep without hearing other people breathe. That he sometimes dreamed in Hakka and woke up confused about where he was.
She listened. She was good at listening, which was an occupational skill—johns talked, and a girl who listened well got tipped better. But with Namchoi, the listening was different. It wasn’t transactional. It was the listening of someone who understood what it meant to carry a weight you couldn’t put down, couldn’t explain, and couldn’t share with anyone who hadn’t carried the same weight.
~
One evening, after a typhoon knocked out the power on Portland Street and the brothel was lit by candles that made the rooms look like a temple, Cindy told Namchoi about a client from the previous week. A British officer. Young, maybe twenty-five. He’d come in drunk and crying—actually crying, tears on his pink face, snot on his upper lip—and instead of wanting sex, he’d wanted to talk. He talked for two hours about a man named Peter, back in England, who wrote him letters he kept in a tin box under his bunk, who he loved in a way he could never tell anyone because the British Army would destroy him.
“He kept saying, ‘I can’t be this,’” Cindy said. “‘I can’t be this. I can’t be this.’ Like if he said it enough times, it’d stop being true.”
She paused. The candle flickered. Shadows moved on the wall like characters in a puppet show.
“I told him,” Cindy said, “that he was already this. That saying ‘I can’t be this’ was just another way of being this. That the secret doesn’t go away because you refuse to look at it. It just gets heavier.”
Namchoi said nothing. He was staring at the candle flame.
“He gave me five dollars extra,” Cindy said. “Best tip I ever got for keeping my clothes on.”
She laughed. Namchoi didn’t. But something in his face shifted—a micro-movement, barely visible in the candlelight, like a door cracking open and then closing again.
Cindy saw it. She saw everything. That was her gift and her curse—she saw what people hid, and she couldn’t unsee it, and she never used it against them.
“More tea?” she said.
“More tea,” he said.
~
The friendship lasted. It would last, in one form or another, for the next twenty years—through the Japanese occupation, through the postwar chaos, through Namchoi’s climb in the triad hierarchy and Cindy’s eventual exit from Portland Street. They’d meet in tea houses and on park benches and, later, in the back rooms of restaurants Namchoi owned as fronts for his operations. They’d never sleep together. They’d never need to explain why.
In a city built on transactions, their friendship was the one thing neither of them could account for. It had no ledger entry. It produced no profit. It served no strategic purpose.
It was, maybe, the most subversive thing either of them ever did—more subversive than Namchoi’s secret sexuality, more subversive than Cindy’s quiet defiance of the mama-san’s rules. In a world that demanded every relationship be either a weapon or a shield, they’d built something that was neither.
Just two people from Hakka villages, sitting in a room, drinking tea, not pretending.
The Little Fairy and the boy who couldn’t be seen. The mask-wearers who took off their masks for each other, once a week, in a brothel on Portland Street, while the city roared outside like a dragon that hadn’t noticed them yet.